Minutes of September 17, 2009 Meeting

1. Comments from the Ethnographic Survey

Most of the comments that pertain to IRIS have to do with the internal workings of the system rather
than its relation to the website. Some of these IPAC will discuss at a future meeting; some may be
features that we may wish to look for when investigating an interface for the OLE catalog.

Recommendations to WAC:

Make IRIS options more prominent on the home page.

Add a collection of library floor maps to the web site.
A number of people requested the ability to link out from an IRIS call number to the floor map that included that location. While technically this can probably be done from IRIS, at present there is no collection of such maps to which to link.

Set up Quick Search so as to enable the user to consistently execute their search by hitting “Enter” rather than clicking on/tabbing to the Search box.
Currently this works from the “Quick Search” option on the home page as long as the user has not moved the cursor past the text box (to select a different search type or select a library). However once the cursor is no longer in the text box, the user no longer has the option to use the Enter key. Additional support from a programmer would be needed to determine whether it’s possible to change the way quick search behaves.

IPAC felt that the alternative solution—switching the selection order—would not only address the users
request but could alleviate some other issues as well. For example, if the order were to be:
Search Type pull-down menu/Library/search terms
not only would the text box –and the ability to hit Enter—be the last option, but putting the Search Type first might encourage more users to do more focused searches. Since we don’t necessarily wish to encourage users to limit their search to one library, another option would be:
Search Type pull-down menu/search terms/Library
Stephanie will ask Sam to set up a mock page to test before a final recommendation is made.
For consistency, if the selection order is switched on the web page, it can also be switched within IRIS.

2. Rev. D

Not a lot of progress. Since we’re still working on getting LDAP to work with MyAccount, the test
catalog is still Rev. C.

3. Symphony 3.3

Should be in the test catalog the first or second week of October. This is the last version that will
have any improvements in Rev. C.

3.3 Release Notes—Some Interesting Features:

Lets users set up "My Lists"

A tabbed display replaces the "My Account" vertical list

Many buttons are replaced by text.

A user can bookmark and permalink to a specific record or to search results.

IPAC will start looking at 3.3 in October.

4. VALE Open Library System

Stephanie has contacted the VALE OLS group about IPAC’s willingness to participate in the
investigation and selection of the discovery level (public interface) for the VALE OLS. Based on the
response, this is not something that is being actively pursued at the moment.

Since we may wish to select and implement a front-end that would be used in place of the Sirsi
eLibrary prior to the VALE OLS switch, IPAC will begin looking at options independently; members
should do some preliminary investigation prior to the next meeting.

5. Feedback

Two requests have been received:

The ability to link from call numbers to floor maps.
This is already part of the recommendation to the Web Advisory Group. There are some non-current maps available. Bob will use these to work out the technicalities of the internal linkage. Simultaneously, we’ll look at linking out from the library name to university location maps.

The ability to click on an 856 without clicking on Details and going into the record.
This is something that IPAC has considered before and not thought to be desirable or practical. However, as an alternative, we will investigate the possibility of getting the 596 to display instead in the hit list instead of the “X and other Libraries” phrase. This would list all holding libraries, including “RU-Online.”

It was agreed that "Rutgers System-wide Electronic Resources" as a library name in IRIS should be
changed to "Rutgers Digital Library" to match the way it's listed on the Libraries website.

6. Information Sharing

Reviewed the organization of the Drupal subject lists. Would prefer some other terminology to
"Primary," "Secondary," "Tertiary."